Journey Kaffe Xihu — Restaurant in Neihu District

I used to come here quite often for a quick lunch when I worked in Neihu a few years ago. Went back today with a friend during lunch time and was utterly disappointed with the service. First, I tried to place my order but the young guy at the counter said I needed to find a table before I ordered. By the time I found a table and went back, an insanely long queue had formed at the counter. There was only one guy taking orders and he looked very flustered.

We had to queue for over 15 minutes to place our orders, then waited for more than 30 minutes for a simple apple blueberry smoothie. Went to counter to ask for my smoothie and the waitresses said it was ready but it was sitting on the counter with 10 other smoothie orders, all of which were melting.

Was still waiting for my pasta (it had been 40 minutes now) so went to the counter again to ask about that and they cooked it in front of me. I asked to speak to the manager, Kenny, who came to our table to apologize. He gave us a carrot cake on the house and two coupons.

The food is alright - smoothies, pastas, wraps, cakes - but all the fuss would have you thinking you were waiting for some 3-Michelin-star dining experience rather than casual lunch. Obviously, the staff - all of whom looked very young and befuddled - are not properly trained to deal with the lunch crowd. Overall, a...

Nice place, very busy at lunch time. Not regular customers don't have a way to know that you first need to find a seat and then go to order, as they will bring the order to your seat. This causes many people waiting the queue to order just to realize that they were waiting for nothing. Then find a seat and wait the queue again, this causes a lot of frustration.

The service is slow, I ordered a chicken & nuts salad and I had to ask one of the waitresses about it after waiting for 20 minutes or so. Then I found that the salad had more ingredients than the ones specified in the description (why bother describing at all?) and that the chicken was a bit spicy (also not indicated).

There weren't forks in any of both self-service areas, so I had to ask the staff for them.

The food is good but the service and the experience is a bit frustrating, specially because it could be avoided with better training for the staff or more staff, and with signs explaining/indicating how the ordering...

This place is not bad per se but it doesn't really stand out in any way to me. We had three different food items and all of them were okay but not really great, and some bakery things which again we're okay but not really stand out, and some juices which were okay but not really great.

Kind of sums it up. They lean more heavily into the food and bakery items versus coffee type things, but the food itself does not seem worth it versus going to an actual dedicated restaurant with better quality for the same price.

I guess my feeling is if you want to go somewhere where you can sit for a very long time and work, this fits the bill okay as long as you're not looking for really good food or really good coffee or other drinks. If either of those other things are more important then this is not the...